Contents

Life and career

Early life

Wynter was born as Dagmar Winter in Berlin, Germany,[4][5] the daughter of Dr. Peter Wynter (né Winter), a noted Britishsurgeon, and his wife, Jutta Oarda, a native of Hungary. She grew up in England.[4][5] When she was sixteen years old her father went to Morocco to operate on a woman who would not allow anyone else to attend her.[4] He visited friends in Southern Rhodesia, fell in love with it and brought his daughter and her stepmother to live with him there.[4]

Dana Wynter (as she called herself) later enrolled at South Africa's Rhodes University (the only female student in a class of 150)[4] and dabbled in theatre, playing the blind girl in a school production of Through a Glass Darkly, in which she claimed to be "terrible".[4] After more than a year of studies, she returned to England, dropped her medical studies and turned to acting.[citation needed]

Career

Wynter began her cinema career in 1951, playing small roles, often uncredited, in British films. One such was Lady Godiva Rides Again (1951) in which other future leading ladies, Kay Kendall, Diana Dors and Joan Collins played similarly small roles. She was appearing in the play Hammersmith when an American agent told her he wanted to represent her. She was again uncredited when she played Morgan Le Fay's servant in the MGM film, Knights of the Round Table (1953). Wynter left for New York on 5 November 1953, Guy Fawkes Day (which commemorates a failed attempt in 1605 to blow up the Parliament building). "There were all sorts of fireworks going off", she later told an interviewer, "and I couldn't help thinking it was a fitting send-off for my departure to the New World".[citation needed]

Wynter had more success in New York than in London. She appeared on the stage and on TV, where she had leading roles in Robert Montgomery Presents (1953), Suspense (1954, with Otto Preminger) and Studio One (1955, with Barry Sullivan), and a 1955 episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: "An Unlocked Window" (winner of an Edgar Award),[6] among others.

Over the following twenty years, she appeared as a guest star in literally dozens of television series and in occasional cameo roles in films such as Airport (1970). She appeared as various British women in the ABC television series Twelve O'Clock High, 1964-66. In 1966-67, she co-starred with Robert Lansing (who had been the original star of Twelve O'Clock High) on the television series The Man Who Never Was, but the series lasted only one season. She guest starred in 1969 on the second version of The Donald O'Connor Show. She appeared in an Irish soap opera, Bracken (which also starred a young Gabriel Byrne) from 1978-80. In 1993, she returned to television to play Raymond Burr's wife in The Return of Ironside.

Personal life

Wynter divorced her only husband, celebrity attorney Greg Bautzer, in 1981. She and Bautzer had one child — Mark Ragan Bautzer, born on 29 January 1960. Wynter, once referred to as Hollywood's "oasis of elegance", divided her time between her homes in California and Glendalough, County Wicklow, Ireland.

In the late 1980s Wynter authored the column "Grassroots" for the newspaper The Guardian in London.[7] Writing in both California and Ireland, her works concentrated mainly on life in both locations leading her to use the titles Irish Eyes and California Eyes for a number of her publications.[8][9]

July 2008 saw Wynter involved in a legal dispute over the proceeds of the sale of a €125,000 Paul Henry painting, Evening on Achill Sound. The painting, which hung in the family home in County Wicklow, was said to have been bought for her in 1996 by her son, Mark Bautzer, as a gift.[10] The dispute was resolved in the High Court in 2009[11]

Death

Dana Wynter died on 5 May 2011 from congestive heart failure at the Ojai Valley Community Hospital's Continuing Care Center; she was 79 years old. She had suffered from heart disease in later years, and was transferred from the hospital's intensive care unit earlier in the day. Her son Mark said she was not expected to survive, and "she stepped off the bus very peacefully".[12]

Dana (given name) — Dana Gender Female/Male Dana is a given name used for both males and females. As a male forename it is well known in the United States, being in the 314th rank out of 1219 in the 1990 U.S. Census. It was among the 100 most popular names given to… … Wikipedia